A Scottish local council is to write to nearly 40,000 individuals and companies warning them that data relating to them was stored on an unencrypted laptop that was stolen last month. Two devices were stolen during an office break-in and one, that was not encrypted, is believed to have contained banking details.

Recipients of letters from Glasgow City Council will be asked to be particularly wary of any approaches from parties over the phone, at the door or via email, looking for further personal information. As usual with such data breaches, the concern is as much about the stolen data being put to use in a social engineering sense to gain even deeper details of identities and personal information.

Meanwhile, in another announcement, Global Payments has revealed that it is currently investigating whether hackers who in April stole around 1.5 million credit card numbers had also accessed other consumer data. At the time of the original incident it had been thought that only card numbers and expiry dates had been compromised. As with any data breach – the broader the data set stolen, the more valuable it is to the hacker, and the more potentially serious the repercussions of the incident.